1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a system and a method for graphically allocating robot's working space, in particular, to a system and a method for graphically allocating robot's working space through using a user's environment recognition.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, with development of sensors and control theories, intelligent robot system has gradually switched from the factory automation relevant field into various service application occasions, which has opened a new field of a service robot. The prior research and development on the service robot are mainly conducted by academic research institutes. However, currently, the industrial field has paid more and more attention to such research and development of the service robot.
Currently, the services offered by the robot are mainly focused on security, touring, and assisting in doing housework. When offering such services, the robot must understand the status of the environment, for example, the size of the whole space, position and size of obstacles, wall boundaries, doorway, and charging station, etc. Many researching achievements about the detection and recognition of features in the environment have been proposed, but desirable recognition effect can only be achieved for certain features or objects. If it intends to effectively recognize various objects or areas in the environment, many technical bottlenecks are still existed for the robot. Even though various researching units all over the world successively issue various intelligent algorithms to emphasize that the robot can get to know the environment more intelligently, but in the practical application, the recognition capability and real-time serving are still rather poor and cannot meet the actual requirements. For example, in the prior art WO0184260A2, the remote control interface for the robot transmits the image back to a remote man-machine interface through a single camera mounted on the body of the robot, and then the remote controller manipulates the robot according to the image transmitted back from the remote control interface and other sensed information. The camera mounted on the body of the robot may result in a problem of a narrow view field, so it has a serious defect in the overall environmental monitoring scope, and accordingly the problem of insufficient sensing information occurs for remote monitoring or visual serving. As a result, the robot cannot effectively recognize the position and size of each area and object in the space, such that it is difficult for the robot and the remote controller to master the working environment of the robot, which may influence the working security and efficiency of the robot.
In another US Patent US2007174777A1, there provides a virtual environment displayed by an intuitive computer GUI, which eliminates the disadvantages of the massy drawings and too many catalogue list levels in the conventional window graphic user interface. A main characteristic of this prior patent lies in employing a three-dimensional office scene frame as the base for allocating the user interface. For example, by selecting a telephone icon on the desk, the actual telephone system can be operated, and by selecting a paper icon on the desk, the file can be opened, or by selecting a printer icon, the actual printer can be used, etc. However, the three-dimensional office scene frame is not the actual working scene of the robot, so it cannot be applied to arrange the robot's working space. In other words, the user cannot change the functional attribute of the object in the three-dimensional office scene frame through utilizing his/her familiarity with the environment and the actual requirements.
Furthermore, currently, indoor designs and arrangements have become diversified. If the environment can merely be recognized by the robot itself, it is difficult to achieve an excellent performance. Therefore, it has become an important issue for the robot manufacturing industry how to enable the user to directly facilitate the robot to recognize each area or important objects in the environment and thus offering more effective services.